First, Annie Duke will explain what to do when you make the wrong decision. Then you’ll learn why we may want to think about recycling our poop, and about misophonia, a true hatred for certain sounds.
First, Annie Duke will explain what to do when you make the wrong decision. Then you’ll learn why we may want to think about recycling our poop, and about misophonia, a true hatred for certain sounds.
Additional resources from decision strategist Annie Duke:
We recycle cardboard and aluminum, but not our poop by Cameron Duke
Misophonia: a true hatred for certain sounds by Anna Todd
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-to-do-when-you-make-the-wrong-decision-w-annie-duke
[MUSIC PLAYING] ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, Annie Duke is back to explain what you do when you make the wrong decision. Then you'll learn why we may want to think about recycling our poop, and about misophonia, a true hatred for certain sounds.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
[SWOOSH]
I don't know about you. But when I'm facing a big choice, I'm terrified of making the wrong decision. But today's guest says, most people's idea of a wrong decision is totally off the mark. And knowing that can help you know what to do when your choice does lead to a bad outcome. Annie Duke is a world champion poker professional, who's since become an author, corporate speaker, and a consultant on decision-making. Her new book is called, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. I asked her, what do you do when you make the wrong decision?
[SWOOSH]
ANNIE DUKE: Well, first of all, it depends a little bit on what you define as wrong. So I think that one of the things that we do is we confuse an outcome that we don't like with making a wrong decision. And that's not true. It's like if you order the chicken and it's dry, it's not a wrong decision. It's the chicken was dry. And that was in the set of possibilities. And you knew that at the time that you ordered it. But you decided that, all things being equal, you'd rather have that than the fish. It doesn't make it a mistake.
Now, that seems like a silly, little, tiny decision. But we end up making that particular error a lot. Where we just think, Oh, it was a bad outcome. So therefore, it must have been a mistake. One of the most famous examples is actually from 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
To this day, everybody's saying she made a really big mistake in those three states. But when you look at what the polls were saying at the time, the polls were saying, no, you're really safe in those states. Do we know in retrospect that there was a polling error? We absolutely do. But those polling errors, you find out about after the fact.
So I would agree that it was a huge mistake, if there were lots of people writing about, Oh, I think there's a polling error. And she's not spending enough time in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In other words, if it was something that other people could obviously see and she was ignoring it, I would agree it was a horrible mistake. But go ahead and do the Google, you're not going to find all that stuff written. And so that's a really good example of looking at the outcome and saying, man, it was a bad outcome for her. So therefore, she must have made a big mistake. But it wasn't really a mistake.
So first of all, we want to understand that. That's number one. So I think a different way to reframe it is to not say, when I made a wrong decision, but to say, things aren't turning out the way that I would have hoped. I think that's a better frame. I knew that there was a possibility it wouldn't turn out well. And I seem to be experiencing that. What do I do now?
Basically, then, you quit. And quitting is really awesome. So you think about it as a new decision, where you say, I could quit and abandon ship. Or are there things I could do to make my situation better? And just think about it as a brand new decision. And realize that quitting is always an option. And you just want to compare that to, does that look like a better option to me today, if this were a brand new decision? Then sticking with what I'm doing.
And if you decide that sticking with it is better. Then you're going to figure out what you can do to improve the situation. And if you decide that quitting is better, you should just go ahead and quit. And things are much more quitable than we think they are. Like even-- if you think about the college decision, people go into that thinking, Oh, my gosh, I'm going to make a decision for the next four years. Except, 37% of college students transfer in the first year.
So this is obviously a really quitable decision. But because we don't think about it that way, we cause ourselves all this stress and anxiety trying to think, we have to make this permanent and final choice. But if instead we said, I think I'm going to like it. But if things aren't going well, I can transfer. Then it doesn't feel so bad when things start not going well. Because you already have a plan.
[SWOOSH]
ASHLEY HAMER: Again, that was Annie Duke, decision strategist and author of the new book, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. You can find a link to pick it up in the show notes.
[SWOOSH]
NATALIA REAGAN: Every year, humans produce an estimated 677 billion pounds of poop. For reference, that is six times the estimated weight of the Great Wall of China. Wasted. Is the way we treat our waste, while wasteful? Better yet, should we recycle it? And the answer, maybe yes. Human feces is seriously undervalued and overlooked as a resource. Just like the cardboard and aluminum we recycle, human waste is made out of lots of stuff that can be reused in a beneficial way.
First of all, we could use it to make fuel, for instance. Human feces is up to 75% water. But a lot of the remainder is methane, which is a main component of natural gas. The methane produced by one billion people could power up to 18 million homes. Come on, who doesn't want a home powered by farts?
Not only that, but the non-water, non-methane, parts of poop make up an organic solid that has an energy density very similar to coal. This means that pound for pound, dried poop generates a similar amount of heat as coal does when it's burned. Those same one billion people would also produce poo residue equivalent to 8.5 million tons of coal. This is the coal you really don't want to get in your Christmas stocking.
Repurposing poop as fuel has a number of environmental advantages. It could help us relieve ourselves from some of the reliance on fossil fuel by replacing a portion of the fuel we use. Even though burning poop would still release CO2, that carbon would not contribute to an increase in atmospheric carbon. That's because the carbon in our food came from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, not from an ancient underground reservoir.
Recycling poop could help us retain valuable nutrients, or as I like to call them, poop-trients. Phosphorus, for example, is a nutrient that plants require for growth. When we eat those plants, we take that phosphorus and flush it away, where it ultimately ends up in the ocean. As a result, it's disappearing. In fact, experts estimate that our demand for phosphorus will overtake supply within the decade. Recapturing it from our waste would net us nearly three million metric tons of the stuff.
And beyond the planetary benefits, recycling poop could be lucrative too. In 2015, a United Nations report estimated that poop fuel, as a resource, could be valued at $9.5 billion annually. In that case, maybe it's time to stop wasting our waste.
[SWOOSH]
ASHLEY HAMER: Natalia, what is your most hated sound in the world?
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh goodness gracious. Right now-- Oh, I don't want to be mean. But I'd have to say, I live in New York. And I just moved into a new place. But my upstairs neighbor is very loud. And he doesn't mean it. But the footsteps here, it just grates on me like, nobody's business. Do you have something that comes to mind?
ASHLEY HAMER: I cannot stand the sound of someone chewing ice. I, personally, can't chew ice. It just sends shivers down my spine. And when I hear other people doing it, it's really intense and horrible. It's less intense for me these days. But yeah, chewing ice. It's almost unbearable for me, for sure.
And most people have, at least, one sound that makes their skin crawl. But if these sounds or others, like chewing, slurping, tapping, snoring, or even typing, send you into an unreasonable rage, well, you might be suffering from misophonia, a disorder characterized by a strong emotional or physiological reaction to certain sounds. People with misophonia traditionally haven't received much sympathy from science. But a 2017 study went a long way toward changing that. That was when a team of scientists, led by Newcastle University in the UK, took brain scans of people with misophonia, while they listened to sounds that triggered their disorder.
Sure enough, the participants experienced unusually heightened activity in an emotion processing area of their brains, which led to an increase in heart rate and sweating. The brain scans also revealed that their frontal lobes were actually structured differently than control participants. Researchers say the similar symptoms and brain changes among misophonia patients are evidence that they have a genuine disorder. These people have a true hatred for certain sounds. And that hatred can hurt them. A more recent study found that the more severe a person's misophonia, the worse they did on cognitive tests when exposed to their trigger sound.
Researchers are hard at work on treatments for the disorder. So far, experts have used sound therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, applied relaxation, and even antipsychotic medication. It's too soon to tell which treatment is most effective though. But the next time you're casually chomping away on a snack and feel someone giving you a death stare, consider that their unreasonable rage could be an actual disorder, and maybe consider snacking somewhere else.
[SWOOSH]
NATALIA REAGAN: Let's recap the main things we learned today. Starting with, we learned that when it comes to making a bad decision, sometimes we need to adjust our perspective to see maybe it really wasn't a bad decision. And perhaps, we didn't have the correct data to make the decision that would have given us the outcome we really wanted. And if you still think you made a quote unquote, "bad decision", you can always quit and start over, or pivot and start somewhere new. Given 2020, it's nice to know that, well, we have options moving forward.
ASHLEY HAMER: If there's something that you just really don't want to do every time you have to do it, just quit. It's great.
NATALIA REAGAN: I think it's a relief. Absolutely. I know that I kicked box for years as a child. And I did it up until I was about 15 or 16. And I talked about it before on the show. And it was a very intense school. If you did anything wrong, you would get these demerits. And you'd have to clean the toilets. And we would kick box in the dark.
I developed really bad OCD while I was doing this. And I'm not blaming it. But it definitely triggered something in me. And then finally, I woke up, and I was like, you don't have to keep doing this. What are you doing? Stop.
ASHLEY HAMER: And we discovered that going number two can potentially be the number one self-sustainable replacement for some natural resources. That's because poop contains methane, which can be used as natural gas. The dried solid matter rivals the power of coal, and we can extract important nutrients like phosphorus to stay healthy. Maybe one day, we'll be taking poop vitamins, who knows.
NATALIA REAGAN: I think it's fitting that the story was number two in the episode.
[LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: Poop is definitely your brand, I would say.
NATALIA REAGAN: No. But I mean, there was no contest on who was going to read this story today. I love poop. I love how much poop can tell us. In terms of conservation biology, I actually, years ago, talked about the Bigfoot show. I co-hosted a Bigfoot show. And we did a spin off of the show, because I taught the contestants that stool is the perfect tool when collected properly to study or look for new species.
And so I had a show called, Talking the S-word. I can't say the word on the show. But you can maybe do the mental gymnastics to figure it out. And it was-- I co-hosted it with my Bigfoot bounty co-host, Dr. Todd Disotell. He's a molecular anthropologist.
But we talked about poop, and how you can use it to get environmental DNA from it. You can basically determine hormone levels, or what species left it, or even what individual, if you get down to the nitty gritty genetic component. And it's just really great stuff. So poop, not only is an awesome resource potentially, but also, I think, it's pretty great when it comes to just being a researcher in biology. You can learn a lot from an individual or a species from their stool.
We also learned that some sounds not only really irritate people, but they can also be downright painful. So when scientists were studying those that were hearing sounds that they hated, they saw that there was a heightened activity in the emotion processing area of the brain, that also led to faster heart rates and sweating. Treatment is being tested out. And it includes, CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy, sound therapy, and even anti-psychotic meds.
So for those of you, I actually dated someone years ago, Ashley, who-- I remember we went to a restaurant for the very first time. And it was one of our first dates. And I remember I took a bite of something with a spoon. Maybe it was ice cream or something of that sort. And my teeth touched the spoon. And all of a sudden, he said, teeth on spoon.
And I could tell it really upset him. And I felt really awful. Because at first, I was like, is he joking? I don't know what-- But it actually, a lot of sounds really bothered him. And I think now, looking back, I feel bad. Because I think he actually may have had this.
ASHLEY HAMER: Could have been. Yeah, I definitely have known people with the silverware on teeth thing. For sure. I forgot about that one. Yeah, that's a big one.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah, teeth on spoon was a thing for a while. I had to really be mindful.
[LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: Because sometimes I'm sloppy. I'm just like, Oh shoot.
[LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: But it's also just the way you eat. And so it's hard to be super conscious of something that is just so natural.
[SWOOSH]
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Anna Todd and Cameron Duke. And edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Jonathan McMichael. And our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: So how about you make a good decision. And join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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